SHAVING AND SIN
My battle against chronic procrastination continues, but with a new moral twist. Is it OK to submit to one of the seven deadly sins in order to conquer another? Is a little evil OK to defeat a bigger one? Before we plunge into this, remember that your editor is not a theologian and so prone to error. However, he is a human being and so faces the same dilemmas as everyone else in the world. So let’s start with a little background.

For many years now, I have been toying with the idea of removing my mustache. The small hairy caterpillar sits quietly above my mouth, hiding an imperfection in my top lip. It’s not that I grew the ‘tash to do that; it just happens to fulfill that role. Apart from a period of about one week some fifteen years ago, this little furry patch has been there since I was able to rub hair from my spotty teenage face with nothing more than a wet cloth. Other than a few baby pictures, I suspect there are no images of me in existence that exclude my fluffy friend.

Yet with age comes two changes to how facial hair works; it gets grayer and more brittle. Most of the time I now look like I’ve been eating an ice cream cone and forgotten to wipe my face. And the brittleness is such that when I use scissors for trimming, there is an audible “click” as the blades snicker-snack through the tiny trees. By the time I reach fifty, I suspect they’ll be a noise abatement order taken out against me. So removing the mustache sounds like a good idea.

However, here’s where the moral issue sneaks in: removing the ‘tash is clearly a sop toward one of my much-discussed sins – vanity. There’s no life-threatening condition here, and the fate of my family or career does not depend on whether or not I keep the fuzz. Therefore, it’s plain, old vanity stepping in, tempting me to take a dip in that fictitious fountain of youth in a desire to stop looking older. One the other hand, I’ve been putting off this action for years now, saying, “Maybe next week” or “As soon as the weather gets a little warmer,” and this strikes me as the rumblings of another sin – sloth. Regularly readers will be aware that I have tackled both vanity and sloth over the years, but more so vanity. This is probably the first time both have appeared at the same time.

It seems to me that I can “leverage” vanity to fight sloth, and if that’s the case, is it right? Or would it be “better” if I used sloth to temper the vanity, bearing in mind that I think vanity is my greater failing? And all because of a mustache! Who would have thought that such a moral conundrum could reside in a trivial case of how to deal with facial hair?

I don’t recall St. Thomas Aquinas devoting a paragraph to “On the removal of whiskers and the sin therein” in his Summa Theologica. Then again, I don’t know whether he had a mustache himself, so maybe this sort of issue is the province of the more hirsute philosophers. I know Karl Marx and Friedreich Nietzsche were both particularly hairy, but Das Kapital and Also Sprach Zarathustra were both noticeably quiet on the issue of personal hygiene. So, no help from the moral philosophers then – it’s up to me to solve the problem myself. I shaved it off. Forgive me for pandering to vanity, but I dragged a sharp, new, triple blade across the petrified forest and returned my face to its baby-soft original state. I chalked up a victory against procrastination, followed the same day by another mighty swipe against indolence – I replaced a light fitting in the basement laundry room that hadn’t worked for years: it took me 30 minutes including the trip to the hardware store.

Oh the shame! I don’t know how long the mustache will be gone. Maybe it will be back in a week; maybe never. Doubtless they’ll be suggestions from my family and friends as to which way I should go, but then if I use this advice, am I not submitting again to vanity, growing or not growing it to “look better?” No wonder Aquinas, Marx, and Nietzsche gave this one a wide berth.